I’ve never used Scrivener before so I may not be doing this right, but according to the tutorial, ““Split with Selection as Title” works in much the same way, except you select a range of text before clicking on it. The selected text will become the title of the newly-created document. This is useful, for instance, if you have a long document containing several chapters each with a title you want to use as the document title.”
I had selected chapter one of my novel (from a document containing nine or ten chapters) and used the “split with selection as title” option. Scrivener happily put chapter one into a new document, but the remainder of the document/chapters vanished. Is this supposed to happen?
I have Windows Vista operating system. The document was imported from Word 2010 as an rtf file (which didn’t give me any problems at all). If you need any further information, let me know.
JustJoan, is it possible that the remainder of the document is in the “Chapter One” file? I used Split with selection and it seemed to work the same as on the Mac. What I did was to go to the second scene, select its title, then split. The new file would have the book from that second scene to the end. Then I went to the next scene and repeated it, etc.
The way this feature works, in an extremely simplified example, is this. Say you have one file that look like this:
[code]Chapter One
Wonderful scene.
Chapter Two
Depressing scene.[/code]
If you select “Chapter Two” and hit Split with Selection as Title, the final result should be two files with these contents, in binder order from top to bottom:
[code]Chapter One
Wonderful scene.[/code]
[code]Chapter two
Depressing scene.[/code]
Now, since the focus remains in the original document, it appears as though your text has vanished, but it should all be located in Chapter two.
This is, actually, a small behavioural bug. What should happen is the second document is selected, and the text highlight you had made should remain, so you can delete the title text if you want.
No, it vanished completely. =( I looked in the other folders but the only folder with anything was Chapter One and only chapter one was in it . . . the others were completly empty. So maybe I did something wrong? I had only highlighted chapter one and I should have highlighted chapter two (and by highlight, I mean selected it using the cursor, not actually highlighting it with the highlight feature). I think the problem may have been in the fact that I selected chapter one instead of chapter two?
Anyway, I started over with a new document. I pasted in the novel again and am now using the other split option. It seems to be working fine.
Instead of using the rtf file, I’m using the cut and paste option this time . . . and I ran into a new issue.
I’ve noticed some of the words of my MS have disappeared. Chunks of chapters are just gone with large amounts of white space between. However, I didn’t panic and went ahead with the split and the missing words reappeared in the new file (in this case, chapter four). So the words must really be there, just not showing up for some reason.
Unfortunately, some of the missing words are the chapter headings so I’m having trouble telling which chapter I’m in to do the split. I’m having to repaste chapter by chapter instead of being able to split the larger document.
Maybe this is a problem with my original formatting in the Word 2010 document that I copied and pasted from?
UPDATE: I discovered a way around the copy/paste issue. I highlighted the whole original pasted document in Scrivener and then changed the font, and all the words came back. So I’m happily splitting at chapter breaks using the “Split at Selection” feature.
I think the problem may have been in the fact that I selected chapter one instead of chapter two?